Product category:
Stand-Alone Instruments
News Release from: Tektronix | Subject: MSO4000
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 05 April 2007
Mixed-signal scope aids embedded debug
Mixed signal oscilloscopes combine three powerful capabilities into one small and lightweight portable device for embedded design and debug.
New from Tektronix is the MSO4000 family of mixed signal oscilloscopes (MSOs) The new MSO4000 family of mixed signal oscilloscopes combine three powerful capabilities - an advanced real-time oscilloscope and logic analyser, and the breakthrough Wave Inspector waveform search engine - into one small and lightweight portable device for embedded design and debug
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 17 Jan 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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The MSO4000 provides a familiar oscilloscope front-panel and a stunning display, letting the engineer control everything intuitively but with only a fraction of the size and weight of other MSOs.
It ushers in a new benchmark for performance and usability, providing uncompromised debug functionality that raises the bar for mixed signal oscilloscopes to its highest level yet.
Embedded systems are literally everywhere.
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Debugging an embedded design often requires viewing analogue signal phenomena and the interaction of digital control signals.
In this mixed signal environment, engineers cannot accurately predict the types of problems that will be uncovered during development.
They need a test instrument with the ability to acquire both analogue and digital signals and display them time-correlated on a single display.
The new Tektronix MSO4000 combines leading oscilloscope and basic logic analyser capabilities so that engineers can conveniently visualise and correlate analogue and digital signals on a single instrument.
"Embedded system designers are often working with both analogue and digital signals in their designs and need powerful yet easy-to-use test tools for both", said Bob Bluhm, Vice President and General Manager, Value Scope Product Line, Tektronix.
"The new MSO4000 provides fully featured analogue and digital channels, long-record length on all channels, the most powerful productivity tools including the largest display, Wave Inspector, and an industry-best price/performance".
"With many industry-best features beyond any MSO in the market today, the MSO4000 Series simplifies operation, ensures measurement confidence and are ideal for engineers needing to more efficiently design, debug, and test their embedded designs".
"Having both digital and analogue channels and being able to see these together on the same large display makes the Tektronix MSO4000 perfect for the type of work we do with aviation applications", said Jacob Campbell, Design Engineer, Garmin AT, a subsidiary of Garmin International.
"I can really get inside the components and see what's going on with test points on the device under test tied to the Tektronix MSO scope".
"I can do in the real world what I usually have to try to do in simulations".
"The features provided by this scope have made my job easier".
"Without question, the Tektronix MSO4000 is one of the most useful pieces of test equipment I have ever had".
The MSO4000 oscilloscope family consists of four models ranging from 350MHz to 1GHz, with two or four analogue channels and 16 digital channels to provide up to 20 time-correlated channels.
The MSO4032 and MSO4034 provide bandwidth of 350MHz on two and four analogue channels respectively.
The MSO4054 provides 500MHz bandwidth across four analogue channels and the MSO4104 offers 1GHz bandwidth on the four analogue channels.
The MSO4104 provides 5Gsample/s sampling on all channels while the other models provide 2.5Gsample/s on all channels.
All models come standard with 10M record length on all analogue and digital channels.
The MSO4000 provides two methods for capturing digital waveform data.
The main digital acquisition mode captures 10M points at 500Msample/s (2ns resolution).
The MSO4000 also provides MagniVu ultra-high-resolution signal acquisition technology that acquires 10,000 points at up to 16.5Gsample/s (60.6ps resolution).
Both the main and MagniVu waveforms are acquired on every trigger and can be viewed at any time, running or stopped.
MagniVu provides greater than eight times faster timing resolution than any other MSO on the market, instilling confidence when making critical timing measurements on digital channels.
"By combining excellent oscilloscope capabilities with basic logic analyser features in the same time domain, the portable Tektronix MSO4000 addresses our needs for design verification and test", said Ryan Fisher, NAND Applications Engineer, Micron Technology.
"The MSO4000 provides familiar oscilloscope operation, gives me the full system 'big picture' on one screen and meets our system development needs for NAND Flash memory used in many embedded designs".
"The fine resolution afforded by MagniVu has been a real asset in finding difficult to discover problems".
"The MSO4000 enables the engineering team at Micron Technology to more quickly find and solve problems".
The MSO4000 offers the groundbreaking Wave Inspector on all analogue and digital channels, an unprecedented set of easy-to-use tools for discovery and efficient viewing, navigating, and analysing waveform data.
Managing up to 20 channels, each with 10M record length, has been dramatically simplified through automated waveform pan and zoom, user definable markers and intelligent search and find modes.
All MSO4000 models provide a 10.4in, XGA colour display, the largest and highest resolution display in its class.
Not only is the MSO4000 the most capable oscilloscope in its segment of the market, at only 137mm deep the MSO4000 is the shallowest on the market - requiring less bench space than competing products - and weighs only 5kg for easy portability.
The MSO4000 combines leading specifications, familiar operation, innovative troubleshooting capabilities, and comprehensive support for monitoring, triggering, and decoding parallel buses and the most common serial buses used in embedded design such as I2C, SPI, CAN and RS232.
"The ability to decode buses, including parallel buses and RS232 signals, combined with the event viewer in the MSO4000 oscilloscope, is a tremendous help in debugging circuits", Campbell added.
"These tools take care of the tedious work of decoding the bus manually and searching through the data to find the event in question".
"This means less time searching for the problem, leading to quicker solutions".
Along with the new MSO4000 oscilloscopes, Tektronix is introducing the P6516 digital probe.
This unique probe design offers two eight channel pods that can each probe parts up to eight feet apart, facilitating the reach to multiple areas on a board with a single probe.
colour-coding of the leads correlates the probe tips to the signal trace on the display.
The sleek P6516 probe leads do not get tangled, making connecting to the device under test simple.
MSRP for the MSO4000 range from Eur 7990 or GBP 5390 for the MSO4032 model to Eur 15,800 or GBP 10,700 for the MSO4104 model.
One P6516 probe is included with each MSO4000 model purchased.
All MSO4000 models are available for purchase and delivery. Request a free brochure from Tektronix ...
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